What Happened to Baby Annie?

Annie Li in 2007, the year she died in Queens. A criminal complaint described her death as a "homicide by shaking and blunt impact of the head."

THE lives of Li Hangbin and Li Ying were intertwined nearly from the start.

Although unrelated by blood, they shared a common Chinese surname, and as third-grade classmates, they shared the same double desk in their hometown, Changle, in the Fujian province of China.

After the two left school, in 2004, each of their families paid Chinese “snakehead” immigrant smugglers upward of $60,000 to sneak them into the United States through separate but similarly arduous and circuitous journeys, they said.

Once in New York, they both took low-paying jobs, became a couple and moved into a boarding house in Flushing, Queens. In August 2007, they became parents of a baby girl they called Annie.

For almost four years, they have both been inmates on Rikers Island, charged with the shaken baby death of 70-day-old Annie, for which they will be tried — together — in a Queens courtroom, most likely this spring.

According to the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, the father, Li Hangbin, 27, inflicted horrific injuries on Annie on Oct. 22, 2007, and then, along with Ms. Li, 26, neglected to call 911 until after midnight, which might have cost the baby her life.

Five days after Annie was taken to the emergency room, she died. After investigating for nearly five months, the police arrested the couple, who at the time spoke almost no English, and charged them with second-degree manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child. Mr. Li also faces second-degree murder, and if convicted, could serve 25 years to life. Ms. Li’s charges carry a maximum sentence of 15 years.

Despite the disturbing charges, a group of supporters has sprung up over the past year in the Chinese community in Flushing, arguing that the Lis, far from being the monsters portrayed by the district attorney’s office, are themselves victims, whose poverty, lack of connections and unfamiliarity with the American justice system made them vulnerable targets for prosecutors.

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Li Hangbin, Annie's father, on Rikers Island. Mr. Li faces a second-degree murder charge, among others. “I would never do anything to cause her harm,” he said.Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

They cite the fact that the couple have no criminal records, and no history of domestic problems.

“The couple has been swallowed up by the system,” said Michael Chu, a Flushing travel agent and local advocate who had never heard of the Lis until a client mentioned the case two years ago.

Mr. Chu’s third-floor travel office, just off Main Street in a neighborhood that teems with Chinese immigrants, has become headquarters for what a banner on the wall proclaims in Chinese as the “Li Ying, Li Hangbin Rescue Committee.”

On the walls, listings of resort bargains and flight deals have been replaced by petitions and clippings from Chinese-language newspapers about the Li case. There is even an elaborate diagram of a family tree that outlines both parents’ family history — including births, deaths and medical records — going back four generations. Mr. Chu said he had gathered “substantial evidence to suggest that there are genetic defects that run in the family line” that might have led to the early deaths of six direct relatives, including three newborns who died at roughly 2 months old.

The family tree was suggested by Mr. Chu’s wife. A local practitioner of Chinese medicine was buying a plane ticket in Mr. Chu’s office last year when he noticed that the diagram suggested that a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, which can cause weak bones, might run in the family and could have contributed to Annie’s death. Mr. Chu has recruited other clients to help him research medical and legal defense strategies, not to mention raise money to pay for the couple’s defense.

The portraits of the Lis drawn by the two opposing sides could not be more different. Legal authorities say they are abusive parents who callously let their daughter languish near death for hours rather than call 911. Supporters say the Lis are struggling immigrants who loved their child and have gotten caught up in legal machinery that they don’t understand and are ill prepared to confront.

The stark disagreement extends even to what happened to Annie’s body after her death. The Lis say the police at the 109th Precinct station ignored their repeated requests to retake custody of the body. Officials from the Queens district attorney’s office say Annie was never claimed by the Lis from the morgue, despite repeated notices from the authorities. Whichever is true, Annie’s body lingered in the morgue for six months before she was buried, without a funeral, in a small pine box in a mass grave on Hart Island.

RIKERS ISLAND, with its 11,000 inmates, is primarily intended for short stays, housing defendants awaiting trial or those sentenced to a year or less in a city jail. Jail officials say the average stay for an inmate awaiting trial is 54.6 days, and for a city-sentenced inmate, approximately 36 days.

A murder case often takes a year or two to go to trial, but rarely longer.

On a recent weekday, Ms. Li sat in a Rikers visiting room, speaking softly in Mandarin. She and Mr. Li have been there since shortly after their arrests, separated from the guards and other inmates by language and culture, and unable to make the $250,000 bail set for each. On this and other visits, she and Mr. Li told their story in separate interviews.

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Li Ying, Annie's mother, has been offered a chance to go free, provided she plead guilty in open court. She has refused.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

After arriving in the United States in 2004, Ms. Li applied for, and received, a green card. Mr. Li started the process to get a green card, and both worked to pay off their immigration debts, holding several low-paying restaurant jobs.

In March 2007, they arrived at the three-story apartment building on Union Street in Flushing that serves as a boarding house for Chinese immigrants. Ms. Li was pregnant with Annie, and they moved into a two-bedroom apartment with Zhou Meizhen, 59, a mother of three, who ran the house.

In August, Annie was born at a hospital. The couple paid for the birth out of pocket because they did not have health insurance, they said. The Lis relied on their “Aunt” Zhou for parenting advice, and she was, in fact, home with the couple on the night of the baby’s collapse. In interviews, Ms. Zhou said the Lis were devoted and careful parents.

“They never even had a fight,” she said. “They were good people. They were happy and always smiling.” She said she heard no crying or commotion in the days and hours leading up to Annie’s collapse.

Around midnight on the evening of Oct. 22, Mr. Li said, he was bottle-feeding Annie when she suddenly began spitting up. Then she lost consciousness. Mr. Li said he tried to revive her with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Ms. Li woke up Ms. Zhou, who called 911 immediately, Mr. Li said. The baby was taken by ambulance to Flushing Hospital Medical Center, where she was revived and put on life support, but with severe brain damage. Mr. Li said he first sensed that there was a legal problem when a hospital staff member told him that donating Annie’s organs could reduce the charges.

“What charges?” Mr. Li said he remembered thinking.

“I would never do anything to cause her harm,” he said in an interview at Rikers.

While Annie remained brain dead and on life support, the police repeatedly brought the Lis in for questioning. Interpreters were used during the interrogation, but the couple did not have lawyers. Both parents resolutely denied harming the child. They said detectives kept them hungry and held them in cold cells, often for hours, before interrogating them for many more. The detectives used a line of questioning that presumed their guilt, the Lis said, and promised them they could return to their dying child if they admitted complicity in the baby’s injury.

They did not admit wrongdoing. But investigators said Mr. Li described accidentally bumping Annie’s head against a small night table just before the 911 call, a seemingly slight accident that, according to the criminal complaint, “is inconsistent with the nature and severity of the complainant’s injuries.”

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Supporters in Queens have helped raise money for the Lis' defense. At center is the Lis' other daughter, Nianni, who is being cared for by Zhou Meizhen.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Mr. Li said that detectives were pressing him to come up with a reason for the baby’s head injuries, and that he finally offered that it was possible that, in all the chaos, her head might have hit the night stand. The admission contributed to his being charged with more serious crimes than his wife.

He declared his innocence, saying, “I would never allow any harm to come to my baby.”

Annie died on Oct. 28, five days after she arrived at the emergency room.

After the couple’s arrest, the lawyers assigned to them requested a suicide watch for the couple, and Ms. Li was put in Elmhurst Hospital Center’s psychiatric unit, where she spent several days in restraints, she said, before being taken to Rikers. She was pregnant at the time with the couple’s second child.

For the birth, on Oct. 30, 2008, she was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center shackled at the hands and feet throughout most of her stay, she said. She gave birth to a daughter, Nianni, whose name means “Remember Annie” in Chinese.

THE Lis’ trial delays are largely the result of language differences, their changing representation and extensive court hearings, including 18 months of intermittent hearings on whether they had been correctly apprised of their rights and completely understood what was going on during their interrogations. A judge ultimately ruled that the interrogations had been conducted properly.

According to the charges, Annie’s injuries included a massive skull fracture from two “non-accidental” blows that caused brain damage, hemorrhaging and eye injuries, as well as two broken legs and a fractured rib that had not fully healed. The death was described in the criminal complaint as “homicide by shaking and blunt impact of the head.”

The complaint goes on to state that Annie’s injuries were “consistent with the non-accidental inflicted trauma of shaken-baby syndrome, which occurs when a baby is repeatedly and violently shaken, causing brain damage.”

The complaint also says the Lis may have cost Annie her life by allowing her to languish for hours with injuries while they sought advice, calling their parents in China instead of immediately calling 911. The Lis say they did call their parents earlier in the evening, hours before they recognized any problems with their child. According to the complaint, a friend told investigators he arrived at the Lis’ home around 8 p.m. and remained until the ambulance came later that night. He said that Annie was not crying and did not show any signs of injury, but that she did seem sick, especially after midnight, and was making gurgling sounds and “sweating and not moving her legs.” The man has since disappeared.

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Supporters with money raised for the accused couple. Advocates say the Lis have been swallowed up in a system they do not understand.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney’s office, would not comment on the case. A law enforcement source familiar with the case who was not authorized to speak and, thus, would comment only anonymously, said the Lis had taken Annie to Flushing Hospital Medical Center as a “horrifically battered baby.”

“Even the most vociferous critics of shaken-baby syndrome would look at this case and say, ‘This is a battered child,’ ” the source added. “The skull was basically broken in half, and in such a small baby, it was just horrific.”

At a training conference in September on shaken-baby syndrome for medical and legal professionals, Mr. Brown, the Queens district attorney, cited a then-pending article in Pediatrics magazine about a study indicating that the incidence of abusive head trauma to American children under age 5 had increased drastically over the past few years of the recession, “suggesting that economic woes may have led parents to lash out against their kids.”

For the Lis’ supporters, the case is not nearly so clear-cut. Mr. Chu points to the other possible causes of Annie’s death, though he’s no expert. In an unforeseen consequence, the long delay in bringing the Lis to trial has provided him with time to raise money and awareness of their cause in New York’s Chinese immigrant community. One man serving a prison sentence upstate sent a $30 check.

At a demonstration last month on Main Street, passers-by put more than $500 into a donation box, next to which Nianni, who is in the care of Ms. Zhou, stood holding a sign that read in Chinese, “Save my mother and father!”

“They say that the U.S. is a country of human rights,” Ms. Zhou said in an interview on another afternoon. “Is this fair? Is this just? How many years of their lives do they have left to waste?”

Mr. Chu said he hoped that lawyers could cast doubt on the prosecutors’ claim that the severe fractures were caused by shaking or flinging, since the autopsy showed no fractures to Annie’s spinal cord and neck. He and other supporters say that if the Lis did delay calling 911, it was not because of any disregard for the baby’s condition, but because they, like many new Chinese immigrants, feared government officials and the authorities in general, even in emergencies. Immediately after the Lis’ arrest, nearly all the tenants in their apartment building in Flushing moved out, fearing repercussions from immigration authorities, Ms. Zhou said.

Last year, Mr. Chu hired Cedric Ashley, a private lawyer, to replace the public defender who had been representing Mr. Li. Mr. Ashley, who has defended others accused in shaken-baby cases, hopes to exploit the growing criticism of the whole idea of shaken-baby syndrome, which has come under re-examination in legal and medical circles as convictions have been overturned and appealed.

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Ms. Zhou often takes Nianni to visit her parents at Rikers.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Mr. Ashley and Murray Singer, Ms. Li’s court-appointed lawyer, said prosecutors, lacking strong witnesses and a direct confession, would most likely make their case in court by calling on medical experts to interpret Annie’s grisly autopsy. Mr. Ashley said the autopsy “will be very helpful to the Lis,” because it shows the baby’s neck was undamaged, an issue in shaken-baby cases. The defense will call its own experts as rebuttal witnesses, making for a trial that Mr. Ashley thinks will be “a battle of experts.”

In the past year, prosecutors have several times offered Ms. Li a chance to go free, provided that she plead guilty in open court. She has refused, she said in an interview, because “I did not do anything wrong.” A false admission of guilt, she said, would send the wrong message to her surviving daughter and dishonor the memory of her dead daughter.

ON a recent Saturday, as she does several times a month, Ms. Zhou took Nianni to visit her mother on Rikers Island.

It is a half-day routine that the girl goes through almost automatically: riding the city bus over the narrow bridge onto the island, standing in the long lines for repeated security checks and searches. As soon as the heavy automatic door to the visiting room slid open, Nianni dashed in past a guard and spied her mother across a room filled with dozens of inmates and visitors.

Ms. Li was the only Asian inmate there. She sat in a plastic chair, at a square table, looking small in her jail-issued jumpsuit. When she spotted Nianni, she smiled, and Nianni ran into her open arms.

Nianni explored coloring books and puzzles in the play area and returned frequently to hug her mother, who seemed subdued, her hands in her lap, her fine black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Ms. Li punctuated her comments with frequent sobs, which she tried to hide from Nianni.

At one point, Nianni walked over and said in Mandarin, “You’re crying.” She hugged her mother.